‘The Iran Conversation No One Is Having’ with David Frum
Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps
Josh Szeps
4.5 • 905 Ratings
🗓️ 5 March 2026
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | How do you get from what was to what is? |
| 0:03.1 | Success does not mean there are elections within 24 months. |
| 0:06.4 | Success means that Iran's capacity to do harm is limited, |
| 0:10.2 | and there's a transition, a clear, workable transition path |
| 0:13.4 | to an orderly progress towards something better. |
| 0:16.1 | When you have decades of rule by terror, |
| 0:18.7 | you build up a big supply of vendettists. |
| 0:24.1 | G'day, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. When the bombs started raining down |
| 0:31.4 | on Iran, I could think of one person who I really wanted to help me understand what was going |
| 0:37.0 | on, what might |
| 0:38.1 | happen, what the consequences might be in the Middle East, and also around the world, and for |
| 0:43.1 | American democracy itself. That person was David Fromm, who had a front row seat to the last |
| 0:49.6 | time America went to war in the Middle East, and it didn't go so well. From was George W. Bush's |
| 0:56.6 | speechwriter, well, one of four speechwriters, but he wrote a very famous line, which came to |
| 1:02.5 | define American foreign policy for the first decade of the 21st century. It was in George |
| 1:08.2 | W. Bush's first state of the union address. |
| 1:15.9 | It was just four months after the World Trade Center towers had been turned to rubble. |
| 1:17.8 | And President Bush said this. |
| 1:24.1 | States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, |
| 1:27.0 | arming to threaten the peace of the world. |
| 1:33.3 | So this idea of President Bush's, of David Frums, of the rest of the Bush administration, |
| 1:40.4 | that America faced a sort of a rogue alliance of terrorist states, provided the rationale for going to war against one of them, Iraq, and the way that war went and the impact |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Josh Szeps, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Josh Szeps and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.

